"The must-see show of the 2008 FRIGID Festival"
New Theater Corps
Posted by Aaron Riccio

Around a dinner table, three actor / musicians sing, pray, beat forks, deliver the news, and snap between scenes in mid-sentence in this brutal but timely deconstruction of War-on-Terror-speak by internationally-known avant-garde composer Rick Burkhardt.  Torture, ticking time bombs, faux-Middle-Eastern folk tales, broken clocks, unreliable waiters

The company

THE NONSENSE COMPANY (from San Diego, California, now based in Madison, Wisconsin) performs unique new works in the fields of contemporary music and theater. Their meticulously detailed, politically urgent performances have earned them a wide array of fans, helping them to bring innovative performance to unusual and unlikely venues and audiences in over 30 cities across the US. The Company's name is borrowed from Franz Schubert’s ensemble, die Unsinn Gesellschaft, who with radically spare resources spawned a revolution in the music and poetry of the nineteenth century.

The Company’s current members, Rick Burkhardt, Andy Gricevich, and Ryan Higgins, have worked and studied with composers and performers such as Steve Schick, Chaya Czernowin, Red Fish Blue Fish, John Fonville, Herbert Brün, The Performers’ Workshop Ensemble, Ed Harkins, Brian Ferneyhough, and Helmut Lachenmann, as well as with theater directors Matt Wilder, David Wheeler, and Stefan Novinski. Their programs emphasizing the works of startling emerging composers have received repeated invitations to theater and music festivals throughout the United States, Mexico, and Europe

RICK BURKHARDT is a composer, songwriter, accordionist, and actor with degrees in Music Composition from the University of California San Diego and the University of Illinois. His chamber music, theater, and text pieces have been commissioned and performed throughout the US, Canada, Mexico, Europe, and Australia by groups such as the Ensemble Surplus, Ensemble Chronophonie, the La Jolla Symphony, sfSound, Toca Loca, the (past)modern duo, the NOISE quartet, and the Olympia Chamber Orchestra. He is co-founder of the School for Designing a Society, a summer institute for activists and artists. With Andy Gricevich he tours the US in the cabaret duo The Prince Myshkins, whose humorous political songs (written by Burkhardt) have been performed and recorded by folk musicians across the country. In April 2006, the Prop Thtr in Chicago performed his new translation of Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, with music arranged and performed by the Nonsense Company, and with Burkhardt starring as Mac the Knife.

ANDY GRICEVICH is a guitarist, singer, poet, actor and composer of music for tape, and perhaps the world’s foremost avant-garde autoharpist. With Rick Burkhardt, he founded the Utopia Train Theater collective in Urbana, IL and San Diego, CA, as well as the political cabaret/satirical folk duo The Prince Myshkins, who for ten years have travelled the country performing for everyone from long-time activists and unionists to theatergoers, high school students, philosophy departments, clowns and nuns. His poems and essays have appeared in various journals of innovative writing. Andy edits CANNOT EXIST, a small poetry press and print quarterly published in Madison, Wisconsin.

RYAN HIGGINS is an actor and musician with degrees from UC San Diego’s theater program. A founding member of the acclaimed San Diego / Los Angeles theater company Olney Productions, he has created roles in dozens of theatrical, musical, and choreographic works composed for him by Nick Olney, Lisa Fay, and Rick Burkhardt. Working frequently with Los Angeles theater directors Matt Wilder and Stefan Novinksi, he has performed major roles in plays by Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, Marguerite Duras, and Wallace Shawn, and in contemporary adaptations from the Noh theater. He is currently researching new possibilities in musically-scored movement-based theater with Jeff Glassman of the United Mime Workers.